The frail boy sat quietly as trickles of spring sunshine illuminated his cluttered room. He was sitting Indian style on his bed, aqua and lime cotton sheets pulled taut under his body, and a dark metallic blue guitar rested gingerly in his lap. He faced the northern window, chin tipped downwards as thick black hair spilled in front of his eyes, almost touching his fine hawk-like nose. He wore a white t-shirt with the name of some obscure punk band emblazoned in bold black graphics on the front and a pair of faded denim jeans with rips in all the right places. If he stood up, you’d be able to clearly see the black boxers that lurked beneath.
He lifted a delicately boned hand, skin as pale as the most alabaster of brit’s and 10 times closer to flawless, and stroked the glittery instrument. The shoulder strap hung loosely on his frame, black and frayed with a myriad of buttons and safety pins obscuring the actual fabric. His fingers reached out again, silver rings to mirror his rainwater eyes flashing in the afternoon light, and tentatively stroked a few chords into life. It’s not that he didn’t know what he was doing. He simply didn’t have the energy to do more than gently strum the unplugged electric guitar, especially when he was so lost in thought as he was today.
He wasn’t what you’d call a happy boy or average or athletic or any of your typical categories. He was an outsider who didn’t even belong with the freaks. He didn’t even belong here on earth. His beauty was transcendental just like his mind. He wondered if it all stemmed somehow from the fact his parents had never really wanted him. His mother hadn’t known she was pregnant and when she found out, she had wanted an abortion immediately. Her doctor told her that he didn’t have any openings for the next two weeks. By the time the opening finally came, she was mysteriously in her third term and the little boy with thick black hair was born very prematurely. Her doctor chalked it up to simple error and the fact that she didn’t know when she had conceived the child. But she felt that there was some otherworldly reason behind this from the moment her hand signed a name she hated on the birth certificate against her will. His father thought much along the same line as his mother, but he refused to speak of such things for fear that it would make him seem foolish or make them all the more real.
The boy reached behind him and to the right, plugging in the guitar and turning on the cheap amplifier that always crackled with more static than music. He returned to his guitar and began to strum it violently. The haunting melody matched his haunted visage and the low, ethereal voice that alternately scratched and purred out his melancholy lyrics. He keened and wailed and mourned his own death with every note and syllable. He often wanted to die. Anything must be more bearable than his current incarnation. But he could never bring himself to do it. He had scars that crisscrossed up his arms, a few even slit parallel to his bones, but always he had stopped the bleeding and covered the wounds and most of the time he could never sink the blade deep enough. On nights like these he would sit unseeingly in the bathtub while salty drops hit the red surface of the bathwater that engulfed him up to his chest. He would send up a silent prayer to what he hoped was a guardian angel and plea for this being to give him the strength to succeed the next night he was reminded how much this world didn’t want him.
But his angel never came.